My 81 Concord wagon project

[craigp29690]

In conjunction with the War Wagon Eagle I've had an 81 Concord that I've been dabbling with for some time.  So finally got the front ball joints and brakes all replaced and got the exhaust on it this weekend.  New radiator, new water pump and t'stat.  Finally ready to take it for a test run down the street.  So jumped in, started it up and headed out of the back yard but something wasn't right.  Had hardly no power and started to stutter and cough and finally stalled.  Tried to restart but it would just sputter a bit so rolled it back into the back yard to investigate the next day.  Next day, tried to start it and it did fire, rolled it up on to the garage and it ran for a few minutes but again no power, like it needed help moving.  Shut it down and started looking at stuff under the hood.  For whatever reason I happened to pull the dipstick and was welcomed by a milky-coffee looking liquid on my dipstick.  ARHG!  Water in the oil,  so suspicion is head gasket or some other failure.  After all the work and time, now it decides to do this.  Oh well, so I guess I either pull the engine and start to see what the problem is or park the thing for another day and work on the 72 Ambassador wagon.   Ya just gotta love it!

[mudkicker715]

Compression test first. Cannot belive a head gasket will kill your power that bad.

[craigp29690]

Oh yeah it can kill it pretty bad depending on how many cylinders have lost compression.  Imagine the difference between a 6-cyl car and a 3-cyl car.

I've been through this on a couple of cars I bought to fix and resell.  Head gasket failures are pretty common because people don't keep up with maintenance and end up overheating the engine.   

The PO on this one had a leaky and clogged up radiator filled with what looked like good old Carolina red clay water.  When I replaced the T'Stat someone had used an extremely liberal amount of RTV on the gasket and it had one part of the opening about 50+% clogged.  But it ran decent when I'd start it and move it around, ran a little rough but I hadn't got to changing out plugs, wires, distributor cap and rotor yet so I attributed the roughness to that. 

[mudkicker715]

Thats why i first said compression test. usuaully if its that bad due to a head gasket than its way more obvious.

[carnuck]

Hopefully it had antifreeze (if you are in a cold zone) neighbor just lost their motor due to - temps and no antifreeze.
Now would be a good time to do a 4.0L head swap!